Instead of improving the actual situation on the ground has become much worse in the past few months. Load shedding is increased from six to eight hours in a day to twelve-eight hours, and twenty hours in rural areas. Ordinary consumers have been suffering and the economy is affected badly.

Electricity constitutes is one of the most important components of infrastructure and plays a vital role in national progress and economic development. Still, today in this most modern and developed age, per capita energy consumption in Pakistan is only 15 MBTU compared to 54 in China,104 in Malaysia, and 106 in Iran. Pakistan has been confronting various social and economic problems in the last few decades. Most troublesome among its imports are oil and food, whose prices soared from 2008 onwards and only recently began to comedown. The country’s oil imports jumped about 56 percent. In the fiscal year 2008, and the food import bill rose by about 46 per cent. It can’t therefore meet its future electricity demand by increasing its dependence on imported furnace oil.

The basic cause is the utter failure of the previous government to increase the supply of electricity to keep pace with the growing demand. While the installed generation capacity had increased by 53 per cent between 1994 and 1999 (from 11,320 MW to 17,400 MW), it is increased by only 12 percent between 1999-2007, to 19,420 MW. After 2007-2022 no major project was completed to help Pakistan to overcome energy crisis. Even that marginal increase was due to the completion of the Ghazi  Barotha Project started in the 1990s before Gen Musharraf took over.

One of the main reasons for the serious shortfall in the generation of thermal electricity is the problem of the “circular debt” which the present government inherited from the previous regime. The power companies in turn could not paz the oil and gas companies, reducing their liquidity to import the furnace oil that was needed to generate electricity. Very heavy line losses in transmission systems, are estimated at over 20 per cent compared to eight to ten percent in other countries. Large scale theft of electricity is clearly revealed by the growing difference between units generated or purchased and those paid for.

One very important reason attributed to this energy shortage is the aging of the generating equipment which could not develop the electricity as per as design requirement. Government must  think sincerely a serious thought that should be given to general overhaul and maintenance of existing equipment to keep them in good working order. Industrial units which do not have their own generating capacity are closing down by thousands. Most of enterprises connate operate economically when power is available for only a few hours a day. Thousands of workers have been laid off in the face of high food prices, unprecedented inflation and growing unemployment. This will also have a very negative impact on the country’s exports which are needed desperately to overcome the financial crisis. As a result, the poor who are connected to the grid are going without electricity during the nearly four hours of outages that are occurring per day.

Pakistan is facing a high cost of production due to several factors like the energy crisis, the hike in electricity tariff, the increase in interest rate devaluation of the Pakistani rupee, increasing cost of inputs, political instability, removal of subsidies and internal disputes. The quickest though fiscally difficult, way to reduce load shedding is to resolve the “circular debt problem” on a priority basis. Internationally, much greater attention is being paid to new and renewable sources of energy such as wind power, solar energy, biofuel, tidal energy etc. Pakistan should enhance it to allow research in these fields and promote much greater use of renewable energy for light heating, agriculture and small scale enterprises.

Pakistan has the world’s seventh largest reserves of coal, after the recent discoveries in Thar. The total coal reserve in Pakistan is about 175 billion tons or maybe more than it. The current coal production is only 3.5 million tons per year, which is mostly used for the brick and cement industry. Conversation technologies are currently under development to convert coal into environmentally friendly methanol and hydrogen gas to be used for clean fuel.

Smaller windmills are also very feasible for remote villages,and in the desert, mountainous and coastal regions, cutting down on the cost of power transmission and distribution networks. In remote farmlands, they have been successfully used for decades in the United States and Europe. But in Pakistan, only a few windmills are now visible, such as the ones at Gharo, where SSZABIST set up an experimental research station many years ago. It is, therefore, very clear from the above that Pakistan needs to aggressively pursue ways to increase its power and generating capacity. The best options available today are nuclear and coal, followed by wind and solar. Hydroelectricity can only be pursued after all environmental, ecological and geopolitical issues are settled with a consensus among all four provinces.

Pakistan government needs to setup at least a dozen nuclear power plants, large coal fired plants, wind farms and solar plants in the next 10 years to generate bout 20.000 MW of electricity. We need to invest at least a billion dollars a year in developing the infrastructure and establishing power plants using nuclear, coal, wind and solar technology. Industrialization around the world has taken place because of the abundance of reliable and cheap electrical power (infrastructure, human resources and government incentives follow. Reliable and cheap availability of electric power n Pakistan will lead to large-scale investment in industry, creation of jobs, elimination of unemployment and poverty, greater manufacturing and exports, trade, surplus and the reduction of deficits. It will lead to a prosperous Pakistan.